This week on “Light Over Heat,” I talk about the TWO books I am writing on American gun culture, tentatively titled: GUN CURIOUS and GUN CULTURE 2.0.

In particular, I talk about what distinguishes them in terms of the substance and audience.

The explainer on the two books is only about 4 minutes long. The remaining 6 minutes of the video is me talking about how the book sausage gets made, the struggles I have had finding a publisher for the first book, and why I think I made a strategic mistake in the order I wrote them.

Links to sources are below.

Link to a blog post and YouTube video on the negative responses I received to my book proposal: Why I Almost Abandoned My Effort to Bring Light and Turn Down the Heat on Guns (Light Over Heat #49).

A blog post from early in 2023 containing A Frustrated Yet Still Somewhat Hopeful Update on My Book on American Gun Culture.

My book tentatively titled GUN CURIOUS puts my personal experience at the center of the narrative. I was encouraged to really lean into my own story by the positive response I received to my presentation at the National Firearms Law Seminar.

My book tentatively titled GUN CULTURE 2.0 is a more conventional scholarly approach to American gun culture. It builds and elaborates on some of my major publications like:

• Gun Culture 2.0: The Evolution and Contours of Defensive Gun Ownership in America
• The Sociology of US Gun Culture
• Targeted Advertising: Documenting the Emergence of Gun Culture 2.0 in Guns Magazine, 1955–2019
• Understanding and Misunderstanding American Gun Culture and Violence

And one of my favorite treatments of defensive gun culture, which unfortunately doesn’t get as much attention because it is buried in an edited book: “’The First Rule of Gunfighting is Have a Gun’: Technologies of Concealed Carry in Gun Culture 2.0,”.